Should Olympic Athletes Be Protesters, Too?

The protests are off to a good start in London. Last week, more than two hundred cab drivers, banned from using lanes dedicated to the Olympics, blocked traffic in Parliament Square. Another cabbie jumped off the Tower Bridge into the Thames. (Police, after pulling the man from the water, protested the man’s protest: “He has tied up a lot of resources and endangered others.”) Those upset with Dow Chemical’s sponsorship of the Games staged a “die-in” at Trafalgar Square. Among other grievances: the lack of a living wage for Olympic workers, the aesthetics of the official Olympic poster, the forced development of London’s East End, and the very idea of the Games at all. One group launched a Twitter account with the description “Official protesters of the London 2012 Olympic Games.” Why? “They have got an official chocolate bar and official TV and the rest of it,” a group spokesman said. “We thought what they were missing was an official set of protesters.”

Along with Presidential elections, leap days, and sudden interest in the pommel horse, protests surrounding the Olympics are among our more reliable quadrennial rites. (Nobody ever seems too upset during the Winter Olympics; in February, we’re just happy to have a reason to stay inside.) Occasionally, the athletes actually get involved. In 1908, when Ralph Rose, an Irish-American shot putter, walked the Stars and Stripes into the opening ceremonies in London, he refused to dip the flag in deference to King Edward VII, who had not yet recognized Irish independence. The Irish contingent refused to participate at all, kicking off a tradition of delegation-wide protests. In 1960, Taiwanese athletes marched into the opening ceremonies with a sign reading “Under Protest,” after the I.O.C. asked them to compete as “The Republic of China.” The United States, after some discussion, agreed to compete in the 1936 Games, in Berlin, but did not go to Moscow, in 1980. The most memorable Olympic protest, of course, came in 1968, when John Carlos and Tommie Smith put on black gloves, stepped to the podium, and raised their fists.

It is tempting to cite these events as establishing a rich tradition of Olympic athletic protest, but Rose, Smith, and Carlos aside, objections by individual athletes have been rare. (We will not count boxer Jung-il Byun’s protest after his defeat in 1988. He was upset at the judging and refused to leave the ring for over an hour. Officials eventually just turned off the lights.) Earlier this month, Sports Illustrated ran an article, in its “Where Are They Now?” issue, wondering why athletes no longer take political stands. Gary Smith wrote at length about Joseph Williams, a football player at the University of Virginia who joined a hunger strike earlier this year in support of humane wages for the university’s service employees. Williams’ presence earned considerable media attention, until he had to bow out, after pressure from his coaches and his stomach. I hesitate to take anything away from Williams’ stand, but it must be noted that he is a walk-on who has appeared in just two games in his college career—games which the Cavaliers won by thirty-seven and forty-one points, respectively. His protest is of a different level than if Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt or this year’s darling of American gymnastics walked to the podium and unfurled an “Occupy Olympics” banner.

Smith’s article asks one question—its title: “Why Don’t More Athletes Take a Stand?”—while hinting at a followup: Are we right to expect that of athletes in the first place? The Olympics, as its organizers are happy to tell you, were founded on the principal of international coöperation and peace. There’s little evidence that this has been the result. What the Olympics are is an athletic competition, and one that, for most of the athletes, is their one chance at the spotlight. We might hope they would use that spotlight to take a stand, whatever that stand might be. But is it worth jeopardizing the moment that is the culmination of years of training for a stand that might not matter? This raises another followup: What good can an athlete’s stand do? Would we care about Lolo Jones’s thoughts about income inequality if she chose to raise them?

Since the last Summer Olympiad, held the month before Lehman Brothers went belly-up, we have experienced a financial crisis, an Arab Spring, and an Occupation. It’s unclear if any of those issues or movements will appear on the medal stand. What statements will come from the record number of Middle Eastern athletes? What responsibility, if any, does Maher Abu Remeleh, the first Palestinian athlete to qualify for the Olympics on merit, have to use his participation as a platform to advocate for his people? Would a British athlete go so far as to wonder, aloud, if his country might have been better off without the costs of hosting this year’s Olympics? And if there are protests, will they even be shown? Television coverage of the Games is built around tradition, not spontaneity, and NBC’s cameras aren’t likely to linger on a medal-stand protest for long. Which is probably O.K. Most of us, athletes and spectators alike, just want to smile, cry, and look forward, with fondness, to 2016.